Many of my conservative friends used to tell me that the government kept secret kill lists and secret tracking lists, following us by our cell phone GPS signals and Internet usage so the government could arrest or kill us at any time — I would either keep quiet and think they were being a bit paranoid or try to reason that it was too costly for the government (let alone private companies like Google) to track so many people.

The Snowden leaks proved them right and me wrong.

What if the other things my conservative friends and family tell me are true?

Are we living in an Animal Farm world where some pigs think they’re more equal than others now that they’re on the podium, getting there by promising a more equal world until they got their hands in the till?

Will the banking and financial sectors, which were barely slapped on the wrists for causing the Great Recession, cause another economic meltdown because they feel invincible now that they’re “too big to fail”?

Are urbanites planning to steal land from the ruralites, incarcerating and killing those that get in the way of corporate greed to own all the means of food production and oil/mineral reserves?

Are corporations like Monsanto trying to own all the seeds that feed the people, in cahoots with a “star chamber” to control the whole population?

Was Obama brainwashed by Chinese communism when he lived in Indonesia?

Do we live in a dystopian technocratic society where our leaders with no formal military ethics training kill their own people using push-button, remote-control drones without getting blood on their hands?

Do cell phones cause longterm cancer?

How exactly does fluoridated water work on the brain?

Are cell phone towers secretly sending massive brain control signals?

Are mosquito control spraying programs the localised version of “chemtrails”?

Do the FBI and CIA create false files on people so they are kept in constant fear that they can be arrested at any time for any reason whatsoever and shipped to secret torture sites out of the country and out of the view of the American public, thus making the American people more accepting of socialist programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act?

Do large corporations purposely keep employee wages so low that they’re forced to rely on the government for food and thus unwilling to revolt against a suppressive government?

Is there a list of more conservative fears I could find to investigate these questions I never took seriously before Edward Snowden opened my eyes to the reality that “just because you don’t believe they’re tracking you doesn’t mean they aren’t”?

Does the UN stockpile weapons in your city in anticipation of largescale riot control when food and water become scarce, driving prices out of reach of most people?

Are government scientists secretly developing a Soylent Green program to convert huge numbers of incarcerated people, arrested for the flimsiest of reasons, including being upset because the police raided the wrong apartment/house, into food when the time is right?

Thank goodness I know that Richard Nixon was the greatest U.S. President who ever lived!

On days like this, finding ways to entertain myself is endlessly fun!

[On a side note, while typing this up, I got a call (“Hello. This Rachel from cardholder services…”) that the Caller ID said was from my own phone number. How funny is that? (And how easy it is to create your own Caller ID info, if you know how.)]

Listening to the cries of my people, I hear them bemoan the loss of coal mining jobs they blame on U.S. President Obama while watching his cronies — Tiger Woods, LeBron James, Jay Z, Beyoncé, Al Gore, etc. — live lavish lives. I can hardly blame U.S. Representative Mo Brooks for speaking to his constituents and saying that Democrats are demonizing white people because perception is reality.

By adopting the conservative thought patterns of my parents and their friends, the feeling of being persecuted by the media is easy to let pass through my visage while watching my elderly cat slowly fade away.

I feel unloved, wanting revenge against death itself but have no relaxing outlet like Netanyahu has Palestinians to slaughter at his leisure.

In moments like this, my internal ugliness, the Berserker of my Viking heirs, picks up this electronic pen and stabs the pages with hateful words.

If celebrities, politicians and captains of industry want to splurge on luxury homes, yachts and multimillion-dollar weddings, then I say let’s party till the house of a planet burns down and return this planet to the blue-green algae again.

Eat, drink and be merry for surely tomorrow more than one of us seven-plus billion will die!

A shriveled-up, rubber balloon, silvery-red, like the dead carcass of a strange alien creature, sits atop the moss growing on our roof shingles.

Where the balloon originated, I know not.

Or, rather, I do, if I think about it enough.

I see a parent shopping in a gift store, buying a bag of rubber sheaths ready to be filled with helium, bagged at a factory, made from a mix of petroleum products, as ancient a form as goat bladders used to hold water by prehistoric ancestors.

Who was the first person to realise bladders could also serve as air-filled flotation devices?

Who first put helium in a balloon for a party decoration?

Shall I risk my life to climb a ladder and retrieve the remnants of a child’s birthday bash, perhaps not even remembered by the child, who could have been one or two years old this time around the Sun?

Leaves swept off the roof a few weeks ago still pile across the glass tabletop of outdoor furniture on the back deck next to the lichen-covered gas grill cover, spilling over onto the moldy lumber of the deck itself.

Raindrops from a small summer storm form islets and peninsulas of wet refuges for airborne bacteria, evaporating too fast for tree frogs to alight on the skylights and lay love’s eggs in the dance of life.

Densely-packed water droplets reflect white light to my eyes, triggering my thoughts to distinguish the whiteness from the rest of the blue sky and think “clouds.”

If only my days of dancing were ahead of me, not behind me, but the sacrifice of gentle peace in my thoughts to rearrange my thought-body coordination to adjust from a nearly sedentary lifestyle to one of freestyle dancing and its associated whirlwind destruction of old habits with the only reward being the ending for my collected group of words called the next book…

Not to mention the difficulty I have dropping my guard in the presence of others.

I do not hate other people.

I am merely uncomfortable letting the real me out on the loose while feeding the people-pleasing personality in me at the same time, along with all the other personalities I feed who give me characters to write about.

I store my thoughts here, unhindered by personal security measures, no reason to hide them from others, because here is the only place I know how to be myself without having to react to others in realtime.

Here I can say phrases like I wish I was dead because I have nothing more to accomplish personally.

When I recently hung out with young people, I felt like maybe I did want to live longer because maybe I did have something more to accomplish personally, what with the sped-up treadmill effect of being in their high-energy presence.

But when I stepped off the treadmill, I returned to my base/real self.

Their joie de vivre about what they loved to do, especially making music and dancing, but also robots and other interests, infected me and made me want the same for myself.

Then I concluded I wanted the same for my self when I was 25 years old, half a lifetime ago, not 50+ years old today.

Sure, age is just a number. Ninety-year olds are completing marathons and jumping out of aeroplanes but they were always energetic (or so I lead myself to believe).

I was never that much of an athletic type. Sure, I sang in high school musicals, participated in high school/college marching bands and belonged to a church choir when I was 30 but only because I was pursuing a girl or bowing to peer pressure.

As I get older, I see that who I am is this person here, the way I’ve been for a long time, talking to myself in the form of diary entries, poems and short stories.

I may never finish another book.

In the past, my books, short stories and poems have been fancy, written forms of excuses for not seeking physical contact with the women I thought society had taught me to say I loved.

The more intense the understanding that I was in love, the more I dedicated thought cycles to formal groups of words like these.

I have grown older, if not wiser.

The return on my investment in writing book-length love letters…well, only once did I get anything for it — I have been married to my childhood penpal for over 27 years now.

Otherwise, the law of diminishing returns tells me that I probably don’t have another book to finish, even if that book was about the very fate/future of Earth-based lifeforms on extraterrestrial celestial bodies.

Why?

Because to complete the book, I’d need to be around people again.

To be around people again, I’d need something to calm my nerves.

To calm my nerves, I have, for the most part, consumed alcoholic beverages.

I no longer like the effect that alcoholic beverages have on my body, regardless of whether I’ll live another day or another century, effects like dizziness, depression and [imagined] swelling of the kidneys.

I generally withdrew from online social media sites because I was no longer interested in the like/plus/chat/comment format of social engagement.

To be honest, online social media was always only an ego-boosting game to me.

I have been ready to die for a long time now, going on almost 45 years, and, in preparation, I want to concentrate on what my last thought will be as I lose consciousness.

Here and now, I focus on what I want to think, not on what I am reacting to in polite conversations.

I have had enough social media validation to last a lifetime.

I am at peace with myself when I’m standing alone, looking up into the treetops, listening to the wind, birds and insects in a spontaneous, extemporaneous, symphony of sets of states of energy in the most natural form of dancing that exists.

As Earth turns away from the light of the Sun and darkness indicates less UV radiation and photons in the space around me, I pause to think of anything else to write today before I post this blog entry and go outside to turn off the water spigot which, through a rubber hose, hydrated the plants at the front of the yard because not enough rain fell to moisten the soil for our curbside flower garden.

If I had my druthers, I’d fall asleep tonight and never wake up again, today being a good day and no days in the future promising more than the peace and quiet I’ve enjoyed during the ten hours I’ve been up and about.

However, I’ll probably wake up tomorrow and have to figure out something to do because I posted my weekly meditation blog entry on a Saturday, not a Sunday.

Am I to understand that an international crisis has reignited and ended a 72-hour ceasefire because of the militaristic trigger-happy actions of teenagers with heavy doses of adrenaline and/or testosterone pumping through their blood vessels? Where is the sane, rational, wise adult leadership in Israeli and Palestinian circles when we need it?😉

Or wait, I forgot. Is there an election coming up or contract negotiations in process that someone wants brownie points to add in hawkish posturing?

I really need to look at that Martian countdown clock and get back on track 200 marsyears in the future, n’est pas?